The aspect and tense verb categories and their relations

Abstract

The paper aims at analyzing the problems of the verb categories: aspect and tense and their relations in the traditional aspect theory. The verb is one of the complicated parts of speech possessing several categories as aspect, tense, mood, voice, person, and number. The aspect category is one of the main verb categories. If verb category expresses action, the aspect category expresses its stages of internal development: process, result, fact, protracted and others. In spite of having the aspect category in their matrixes, some languages are considered to be temporal (Turkic) in spite of having a set of developed plans of expressions and plans of contents and some languages are considered to be aspectual (Slavic languages). All of these verb categories function in a single continuum of expression. It becomes the reason of some problems connected with aspect theory in general and the aspect category in particular. It is difficult subjectively to identify meaning, function of each discrete category of a verb because of single plane of expression. This reason affected the creation of an aspect category definition. According to traditional aspect theory, the aspect definition states, that aspect expresses ‘action occurs at the time or the distribution of the action in time’. On the basis of definition, the aspect category is created by tense category, when they are two independent categories with their discrete meanings. One concept is explained by another concept. It contradicts to logic laws. The main conclusion of the article is that the aspect category and tense category have two different discrete meanings and the role of tense category is not correctly defined in the aspect category, which leads to such division of languages as aspectual and temporal. All languages have the aspect category initially, because it is included in the matrix of a verb.